[-empyre-] attrition.. was Who decides and what to preserve

["Melinda Rackham" <melinda@subtle.net>]

hi everyone..
hey great conversations.. thankyou all for the fluid and
considered posts.

i wanted to think  a little more about what gets archived..

 the political and historical aspect is very interresting..
im sure that the warlords of history, the aristocracy,  the
benefactors, the catholic church, etc  didn't commission
artists and writers to document  perspectives other than
their own glory, yet we have a plethora of alternate points
of view in various historical documents saved in often
random  ways. and i guess in the same way any country , no
matter how democratic it says it is, will not  go out of its
way to give platform to opposing  views.

One presentation i found fascinating at the National
Library's International Conference on Archiving Web
Resources http://www.nla.gov.au/webarchiving/ last year  was
by Hanno Lecher from the  Institute of Chinese Studies,
Leiden University, the Netherlands who is archiving Chinas
internet.. see  http://www.sino.uni-heidelberg.de/dachs/.
China of course  is famous for banning/blocking websites -
and actually you have to admire the absolute honesty of
communism  which just publicly disappear the opposition
while democracy does it in sneaky ways! However because of
this project the perhaps otherwise insignificant  banned
internet sites, which would probably be completely lost, are
getting to be archived foe research purposes in another part
of the world.

But maybe net content is a little more fragile than other
documents?

My bigger point is that the net changes so fast that we have
lost enormous number of sites form less than a decade ago.
And not from political or social agendas, but from hardware
updates , browser upgrades and plug-in dissapeances.

i was checking over one of my net.works from 1996 on Monday
as it is about to be exhibited again. but i actually had  to
view in a old old old Netscape browser ( i keep a browser
version archive) so that the java and java script works
properly. of course you can  you can view it in a
contemporary browser and you get what look like a functional
web site,  but you dont knwo there are other bits you are
missing out on cause new browsers don't support that
specific code any more.

I, like Simon,  have a huge mound of my own archives, in
huge range of formats, some of which i cant even read any
more cause i dont have the right hardware bits and plugs and
adaptor things after a burglary. in fact, im so sick of this
situation  i  threw out a whole lot of this stuff ( do i
really need a netscape1 installer on a floppy disk ?) ,
including a really old (40 meg) external harddrive at the
weekend and i dont even know what was on it,,the person who
picked it up on the street may now be enjoying some early
net art!!  is it really my responsibility as an artist to
keep all of this myself?

on a wider scale.. and in  that often more interesting works
use non standard code it seems maybe what we are left with
may be the stuff that is easier to archive, rather than any
other archival criteria?

So  attrition happens by more subtle means.

 Melinda